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MoMA Award Goes to Architecture for an Economic Hangover

In the wee hours of Sunday night, to blaring music by the Australian band Cut Copy, the architects Hilary Sample and Michael Meredith were putting the finishing touches on a new project, a mix of what could be described as cones, domes, smokestacks, primitive huts, towers or industrial chimneys.

By the next morning they were ready to load their architectural model into their station wagon in New Haven for the trip to New York with help from their Yale and Harvard students. They were scheduled to present it Monday afternoon to the Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, which sponsor a competition each year to transform P.S. 1’s courtyard in Long Island City, Queens.

It didn’t fit.

“We had to rent a minivan,” Mr. Meredith said.

Their presentation, the last by the five finalists, seemed no more auspicious. The judges were hard to read, Ms. Sample said, and posed tough questions like “Why are you doing it?”

“We thought we lost,” Mr. Meredith said.

But on Monday night they learned from Barry Bergdoll, the Modern’s chief curator of architecture and design, that they had won the competition, known as the Young Architects Program.

Their project, titled “afterparty,” is indeed hard to describe. There is its unusual mix of forms and materials: aluminum, thatching, concrete pools.

In their official proposal, the architects say their design is meant to honor and reflect current economic realities. The materials are basic, including a lightweight aluminum frame comprising recyclable parts, with minimal assembly required. “Today, we find ourselves at the after-party, rethinking and resituating architecture,” they wrote.

Ms. Sample and Mr. Meredith described their installation as “a temporary urban shelter and passive cooling station” for the events at the Warm Up summer program at P.S. 1, which includes concerts and outdoor dancing. Air cooled by the courtyard’s existing shaded concrete walls and concrete water troughs will be drawn up through the chimneys by induction, they said, creating a breeze. The courtyard installation is to open to the public in late June.

Photo

Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of MOS designed afterparty, a structure for P.S. 1.Credit
MOS

The architects were inspired in part by the architect Louis Kahn, who “could go between high tech and very primitive,” Mr. Meredith said. Ms. Sample said the thatching was added with the textile artist Anni Albers in mind.

Mr. Bergdoll expressed admiration for the shapes. “Some are tall and chimneylike, heroic cones, others more broad and space-grabbing and evocative of the open ruined vaults of the Roman Forum,” he said.

Mr. Meredith said the structures were meant to evoke the fading factory vernacular of the P.S. 1 area in Long Island City. “We’re interested in building typologies,” he said.

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To some extent the design is an attempt to break free of the courtyard’s boundaries, to reach out into the surrounding area and diversify the landscape. “One of the problems with the courtyard is it’s almost hermetic,” Mr. Meredith said. “How do you create variable scales of space?”

The cones, towering over the courtyard walls, will be visible from afar and change the local topography. “It’s kind of a neighborhood landmark,” Mr. Bergdoll said. “You’ll be able to see it from the subway and from the Long Island Expressway.”

MoMA and P.S. 1 set a budget limit of $70,000 for each entry. Mr. Meredith and Ms. Sample, who founded their own firm, MOS, in 2003, said they were accustomed to working with limited funds, because their clients are mainly arts and nonprofit organizations and their commissions include modest installations.

Their Web site (mos-office.net) describes their firm as “a collective of designers, architects, thinkers and state-of-the-art weirdos.” They take almost any work that comes their way. “We really don’t say no,” Mr. Meredith said. “That’s one of our policies.”

He and Ms. Sample suggest that the economic downturn will demand a return to such essentials. “It’s not going to be about the exuberant, gestural form,” Mr. Meredith said. “It’s going to be about a more modest and thoughtful architecture.”

Mr. Bergdoll said the other finalist firms — Indie Architecture of Denver, Bade Stageberg Cox of Brooklyn, L.E.F.T. of New York and PARA-Project of Brooklyn — were similarly mindful of the financial climate.

“All responded to the economy in thinking low-tech, inexpensive materials,” he said. “How do we get more out of less? How do we still create a fun party space when clearly the economic party is over?”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C5 of the National edition with the headline: MoMA Award Goes to Architecture for an Economic Hangover. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe